Theaster Gates on his Serpentine Pavilion: ‘It is intended to be humble’

One of the ironies of architecture is that the simplest of forms can provoke the most profound symbolic, historical, personal and emotional associations. And this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, Black Chapel, is a very simple form indeed.

The slightly sinister black cylinder rises from the green lawn of Kensington Gardens like a charred grain silo, perhaps an oil or a paint can, even a wall of death. The enigmatic black material which seems to soak up the light turns out to be off-the-shelf roofing membrane and is the giveaway. This strange structure could only be a work by Chicago artist Theaster Gates.

From his early works, transplanting the roofing techniques he learnt from his father into the gallery (the black roof in the white cube), Gates has mined veins of labour and blackness, urbanity and the history of inequality, music, community and the often surprisingly fuzzy line between the everyday and the sacred.

He was inspired to create this work, he tells me, by the revered Rothko Chapel in Houston. “It was this idea that a place could be dedicated to the sacred,” he says, “but not built by the church. The de Menils [who funded the Rothko Chapel] were activated by a mission for social change. They commissioned an architect, Philip Johnson, and a Jewish visual artist and filled it with new sacred music from Morton Feldman. There are few places that bring together social and artistic use — the Black Panthers occupied the space along with avant-garde music.”

Gates has worked here with others, including architects Adjaye Associates, but he is in effect artist, curator and architect in one. “I don’t think of myself as an architect,” he says, “I don’t have the certification.” (He does hold a degree in urban planning.) “The modesty of the building is intended to be a reflection of my respect for architecture. It is intended to be humble.”

Gates is being overly modest. He has been responsible, in one way or another, for 40 buildings around his native Chicago. The most remarkable of these, an adaptation rather than a new building, is his Stony Island Arts Bank, sited in a small but grandly conceived bank building from the early 20th century on Chicago’s South Side. It rises from a landscape of almost complete urban desolation, a once-thriving neighbourhood eaten away by bulldozers as the buildings slowly emptied and became derelict in a brutal political act, an urbicide that stripped the largely African-American population of any sense of city-ness, leaving only parking lots and budget strip malls. But inside Gates’s Arts Bank is a world of culture, an archive of records, blues and jazz, magazines, walls lined with books, a repository of a vivid cultural history which belies the way black America was treated at the level of the street.

Kensington Gardens seems very far from the South Side. How, I wonder, does that particular idea of blackness travel? “I got a lot of response when I created a Black Cinema House, people were saying, ‘Why can’t you just drop the black, wouldn’t that make it more inclusive? Doesn’t calling it Black create bias?’

“Well, every cinema I’ve gone to has been a white cinema house. It just doesn’t say that above the building. In a way, the blackness becomes both intention and declaration.”

This pavilion, however, posits a more complex idea. “The black is fully absorbing of the light,” he says, “but it also offers light on its surface. It shimmers in a way I hadn’t anticipated.”

That effect is most fully visible from the benches lining the walls inside. If the exterior is a simple, platonic form, the interior is a more nuanced space. At its apex is an oculus; the clouds were racing by when I visited, interrupted by flashes of blue. It is a little bit James Turrell and a little bit Pantheon: the hole is left open and the rain will fall directly through, intensifying the connection with the sky. “It asks,” says Gates, whether “it is possible for us to be on Earth in the vessel and have access to the heavens . . . I just build it and hope nature’s television will show up.”

The word “vessel” is one the artist keeps returning to. “When I first started making art I would lead with being a potter more than a conceptual artist. I wore it as a badge of honour. This is a continuation of that making of vessels. Making an open vessel is my primary preoccupation, my love.” He sees the pavilion as part of The Question of Clay, a multi-institution project with past exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery and White Cube, and a research project at the V&A.

“To create a vessel is to create a space for gathering,” he says. “My hope is that what happens inside will trump the structure. This is the only way I understand how to build.” So the vessel’s content, the programme, will become an integral part of the architecture. Pottery workshops and concerts, conversations, music and tea ceremonies, all heralded by the ringing of a huge bell rescued from the now demolished Catholic church of St Laurence back on Chicago’s South Side.

The designation of this design as a chapel was given a particular poignancy by the death of Gates’s father last month. “I’m dedicating this to my father. The roofing membrane — the thing is essentially one big roof — is the material he taught me to use, it’s both homage and memorial. It is to give thanks to my parents for teaching me to work and giving me a tremendous amount of love. I hope it will make a space for love.”

The tribute is heightened by the inclusion of Gates’s shimmering roofing-felt works on the walls, a translation of labour into art through positioning within the art-world context. “I don’t think about this as a pavilion,” he says, “but as a sacred zone in the garden.”

To October 16, serpentinegalleries.org

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